Well well well. Long time no see (perhaps even the longest break I have ever taken on this blog?) but here I am again. The last six months have been ridiculously busy, what with multiple important essays in Epiphany term that took all my time and effort, the Easter holidays which weren't really holidays as I spent part of the 5 weeks on a research fieldtrip in Liverpool and the rest of the time writing up the field report from the trip, and then finally exams in Easter term which took over my life for about seven weeks. Phew! Here are some things which have happened since I last blogged:

1. I turned 20! I have a half-finished post in my drafts about my birthday that I wrote in mid-February and never got round to publishing so I might just finish that off, even if it is about half a year late. But yep, I'm now officially no longer a teenager and closer to 30 than 10. Still processing that to be honest...

2. I finished my second year of university! I think I'm going to do a full on 'review' type post about my second year like I did last year, just for my own purposes and if anyone at all is interested in my thoughts on university life. Briefly then, it's fair to say that my second year has been really tough in terms of the effort required (see above) but also so interesting in terms of the work I did and the topics I studied, and I made a lot of really great memories. And to top it all off I got a 1st overall! Second year only counts for 40% of my overall degree mark but with 76% in the bag I think I've made a good start on doing really well.

3. My best friend visited me at uni! It was a fleeting visit for various reasons but it was so lovely to see her and to show her around Durham and introduce her to my uni friends. I definitely had the slightly disturbing sense of two worlds colliding!

4. I went on holiday with some uni friends! Durham has this thing where after exams we have three weeks of nothing where technically we're supposed to stick around but there are no lectures or anything, so way back in January we decided to book flights to Alicante and spend a few days at my family's apartment in that area. It was such a lovely and much needed post-exam getaway, and nice to be back at the apartment as I haven't been there in about three years.

Obviously more things happened but those are the highlights off the top of my head. Another major one was getting an internship with a planning company in the UK which I'll be doing for the whole of July and August, and then coming home for the last month to do my dissertation research. It's going to be a busy summer...

x

 

 

Although the Christmas period is well and truly over I'm one of those nosy people who love finding out what other people got for Christmas, so I thought I'd follow the trend and show you some of the presents I received this year. Rather than including every single thing I've decided to be selective and instead choose my top five presents to show you in no particular order - these aren't necessarily the 'biggest' or most expensive ones, just my favourites that I'd like to share!

I really love history and learning about the past so when I saw this in a bookshop a few months ago I knew I had to add it to my Christmas wishlist! It reminds me a lot of a similar book I had when I was little but this is much more orientated at adults and teenagers in terms of the topics and writing. The cover is stunning with really beautiful gold lettering, and it has great page spreads that are really engaging and dynamic with a good balance of text and photos to keep things interesting. It's absolutely massive too and weighs at least a couple of kilos, which is the only downside because it makes it quite hard to manouevre - the past couple of times I've been reading it in bed I've ended up pinned under it! Definitely one for the coffee table I think.

I've been wanting this for so so long and I'm so happy to have received it! I just love the bottle, I think it's so luxurious and obviously it smells gorgeous too. But as is always the way with expensive perfumes, I'm finding myself reluctant to spritz it and wanting to save it for special occasions! 

This is the latest addition to my little vinyl collection which so far just consists of my favourite albums in vinyl form. Electra Heart is one of my favourite albums of all time so I've wanted it on vinyl for ages and it does not disappoint! It sounds really good even on my slightly crappy Crosley cruiser (I know, I know) and it includes all the lyrics on a separate piece of paper. There are actually two records in here, and they each have 3 or 4 songs on which is slightly annoying because you have to swap them around a lot but it's all part of the charm in my opinion! 

It might seem a bit weird to have a washbag as one of your favourite Christmas presents, but words cannot express how much I love Paperchase's Gothic Garden range in any imaginable form. It's honestly the most me range I've ever seen; I love the darkness of it and the floral elements with the gold accents, it's truly beautiful. I think it was new in this autumn so it must be reaching the end of its store lifetime which is tragic but also brilliant because hopefully it will be on sale soon! I needed a new soft washbag as the one I currently have is huge and doesn't squash down very well even if it's not full (if that makes sense?) so this is a great replacement.

I'm including these collectively because I just can't choose between them and they kind of go together anyway. The Grand Budapest Hotel has been one of my absolute favourite movies ever since I saw it in the cinema, and it's definitely one of my top 5 films of all time. I've also seen Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me before, but it wasn't great quality so I'm excited to watch it again. I'm slowly building up my Twin Peaks collection (I also got a book on it this Christmas) in preparation for the revival this year! And last but not least, this is possibly the only DVD production of Hamlet I haven't yet seen so I just had to get it. It's the 2000 version with Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan (aka Special Agent Dale Cooper) and it's set in contemporary New York City which is so interesting. 

It's been a while since my last haul post so let's kick off the New Year with an exploration of my recent purchases. Since going back to uni for the autumn term my love of charity shops has been taken to the next level as I discovered that they usually have quite a lot of books and DVDs in addition to clothes. I'm not quite sure how I'd managed to miss this up until that point but there you go. 

As I think I mentioned in a previous post, I now take the bus most days to get from my house to lectures. In actual fact I take two buses, not because it's a particularly long way but because the bus routes don't go in an ideal direction so rather than going in a sort of full L-shape I have to take a different bus for each bit of the shape (if that makes any sense?). As a result of taking four buses a day I have ended up spending quite a lot of time waiting in the bus station where there's a really good charity shop that I pop into at least once a week so I have ended up with quite a haul! Here are the bits and bobs I bought in Durham over the winter term - they were about £2 each, sometimes £3 so really good deals all round:

I also visited family in Gloucestershire between Christmas and New Year and happened to go into an Oxfam shop while out shopping where I picked up three DVDs. Everything was half price that day so these came to a grand total of £4! Which is especially amazing as the 3-disc one was only actually £1. Out of these ones I've seen Moonrise Kingdom and Notting Hill before, but none of the others:

And that's my little charity shop haul for the past few months! Here's to finding more great bargains in 2017.

Whoops would you look at that, somehow Christmas is over and it's already that slightly surreal period in the year where everyone is just waiting for the New Year to roll around and I still haven't published a post-first term blog post! Well obviously I have now that you're reading this but you know what I mean.

So yes, it's the end of another term and I'm finally back home recovering from the past few months, enjoying the Christmas period and trying to catch up on some reading in between Christmas TV and spending time with my family (which itself usually involves watching TV). It seems to me that I'm doomed never to simply have a boring drama-free term at uni: instead, it's always full of ups and downs in the form of absolute highlights and rock-bottom moments. When I'm at university I seem to experience everything in extremes, which is draining for someone like me who's an introverted perfectionist at the best of times. I suppose my uni years are just turning out to be a metaphor for life, which comes as a shock after years of living comfortably and averagely. But even though I'm getting quite accustomed to all the #drama, somehow it makes it all worth it that at the same time I've also had some wonderful days and unforgettable moments and ultimately made more friends than I've lost. It's definitely a goal of mine for 2017 to keep things in perspective and remember that I need to keep seeing the bigger picture and not let the extremes go out of focus.

On the plus side in academic terms things are going swimmingly, although I may regret saying that in a couple of months's time! But for the moment it's been great, as since I don't have to take any horrible physical geography modules I can now devote my full attention to studying things I actually care about. Part of this has involved the rediscovery that I actually really love learning: I love the challenge of not understanding something immediately and then going away and learning about it and gaining new perspectives only to come back with my own critical views on the subject. Also, the type of geography that I'm studying is really very close in subject matter to a lot of 'social justice' topics you see in non-mainstream news channels. Case in point: while scrolling through twitter the other night I came across an article from a feminist news site which essentially utilised and modernised the argument of an article from the early 90s that I was reading at the time. On that note I have resurrected my twitter to use for 'serious' academic purposes which means I'm following all my lecturers and interesting academic and news-related accounts and I just retweet stuff I find interesting. So please feel free to follow me if you like that sort of thing!

Anyway, I think that's all I have to say for the moment. In a couple of days I'm off back to England to see family and then back home for a week or so before I go back to uni for next term!

x

Hold onto your hats because it's been a ridiculous 14 months since my last fashion fancies post! What happened - I hear you ask - and the truth is I don't know, I suppose I just ran out of inspiration and other things got in the way. But this post has been lurking in my drafts on Polyvore for months so I thought it was about time I published it! If you don't know what this is about, basically I take a historical or fictional character and come up with a few outfits that I imagine they would wear and the situations they would wear them in. In the past I've done Catherine Howard, Cathy Dollanganger, Wednesday Addams, Mia Thermopolis, Dolores Haze and Sylvia Plath, but today I would like to turn my attention to possibly the most stylish of my favourite female characters of all time: none other than Audrey Horne.

I only watched Twin Peaks for the first time over Easter this year but since then I have been constantly rewatching it and I think I must have seen the whole series all the way through at least 7-8 times now. There are honestly no words to describe how much I love this series: I love the storyline, a sort of murder-mystery in a small town type thing but so so much more; I love the characters, who are all so real and alive (apart from Laura Palmer obviously); I love the atmosphere, how it's set in a town nestled in the woods where a certain evil lives; I love the absolutely hauntingly beautiful music; I love the authentic 90s fashion; I could go on and on! (please note there will be spoilers)

But one of my favourite things about the series is the character of Audrey Horne, and specifically her character development. At the beginning of season one she's seen as a troublemaker and deliberately ruins one of her father's business deals for attention, not to mention tries to seduce an FBI agent and infiltrates a brothel to help him with his investigation. As the series go on she finds love elsewhere and becomes a social activist, committing an act of disobedience in the name of the local environment.

I imagine this is something Audrey would wear on a romantic date with Agent Cooper or John Wheeler, perhaps to a fancy restaurant in the town. The dress also reminds me of what she wears when she infiltrates (and ends up getting trapped in) One Eyed Jack's but we'll gloss over those episodes because they upset me. Basically this outfit is full on timeless glam and the colour is so Audrey it hurts.

For me this outfit sums up Audrey's everyday style in one look. The colours are muted and complement each other but there are little touches like the neckline and heart-shaped sunglasses which express her personality. And of course there's a plaid skirt involved! To sum it up: 90s fashion at its best.

One of my favourite scenes with Audrey is the school bathroom scene near the beginning of the series - not only is it unbelievably aesthetically pleasing it's also a lovely interaction between Donna and Audrey, who are later revealed to be half-sisters. This is nothing like what she wears in that scene but I think the 'school vibe' does serve to remind us that for all her glamour, sophistication and worldly ways Audrey is still only a high school student and teenager trying to find her place in the world. The saddle shoes are a reference to another iconic school scene too!

Throughout the first half of the series Audrey tries to help both Cooper and Donna Hayward find out the identity of Laura Palmer's killer, and her adventures take her to increasingly seedy places. I think this outfit has little touches which recall stereotypical detective attire (like the hat and trench coat) but with a modern, feminised twist. It's simple, practical and stylish, and note the little coffee cup pin!

Somehow it's already November and I'm well into Michaelmas term, as is starkly evident by the number of assignments that are suddenly being thrown my way. Having said that uni is going pretty well: this year is so much more interesting in terms of what modules I'm taking so I'm actually motivated to do all the reading (or at least as much as I can get through), and as a result I'm enjoying it a lot more and managing to keep up with things a bit better.

Being back in Durham is also really lovely, I feel like it's definitely becoming 'my' city but I'm still discovering new things every day. For instance I'm a big fan of the bus system - I'd never used it until the beginning of this term but now I spend a lot of time pootling back and forth across the city and looking wistfully out of the window. On one of these trips the other day I started mentally listing some funny little idosyncracies of student life in Durham so I thought I'd share them here - so at risk of sounding like a Buzzfeed article, here are some things that anyone who goes to Durham will be all to familiar with:

My room is hands down my favourite thing about my second year at uni so far so of course I had to do a room tour to show it to you, especially now I've more or less finished the decorating process. Compared to my tiny little room in college last year (see my room tour for that here) it's a real luxury as it has actual space and a double bed, so I've tried to do it justice with my little decorative bits and bobs and, of course, photos galore.

This is the view from the doorway as you walk in, I think it's really attractive and welcoming with plenty of colour. The furniture provided was just a bed, desk, desk chair and the huge wardrobe in the back so as you can see I've added to it - I got a rug, a little bookcase and a bedside table which you'll see in the other pics.

This is my little desk area. Unfortunately the desk is pretty small, way smaller than the one I had last year which could fit my printer on it comfortably and had plenty of room left over for me to spread out all my books and papers - hence why my printer is on the floor. I've got my world map on the wall for when I need that geographical inspiration, and when my command strips arrive in the post I'm planning to put my pinboard on the wall too. 

At the moment I just have some essential bits and bobs on my desk, like some pots of pens, a desk light and and a file organiser. I think it's going to be essential to keep the space clear as much as possible, given there's so little of it!

Now we move over to my bed area, where I've got a little bedside table unit from IKEA and a lamp from Argos (which was super cheap! Around £3 I think). The windowsill is where I'm keeping my framed photos and also makeup as there's a handy full-length mirror just out of shot. My duvet cover is from Primark, which is also where I got the matching throw!

The room had curtains up when I moved in but I decided to take them down and store them away as there's a blind anyway and they were sort of in the way. Of course this meant I had a random curtain pole to do something with, and I thought it was the perfect place to put my fluffy pink fairy lights up - plus the mirror is a handy spot to perch the battery pack.

Above my bed is my little photowall, which I'm hoping to add to this year! I was originally going to do a washing line display with string and mini pegs but I thought this simple arrangement looked much more clean and effective.

I decided to buy this little bookcase as there wasn't much in the way of what I call display shelving (i.e. places to put books and decorative bits) and it was only £20 from Argos, which I think is well worth it even if I can't take it home with me at the end of the year. I decided to get it in black so it would match the desk because coordinated furniture pleases me immensely. So far I've just got a few books and DVDs, some tech bits, folders and some photos on the top.

Finally here's the huge wardrobe which is basically the width of the whole room! There's SO much storage space in here which is excellent because I can just cram all sorts of stuff in there and pull the door across to hide it.

To create more small shelves I bought this blue hanging thing from IKEA which is basically where I'm keeping all my clothes. Underwear, tights and pyjamas are in the drawers on the right and I've got the middle shelf set up as a sort of dressing table area with jewellery and some more makeup. Then shoes are on the floor in the wardrobe, cardigans are hanging in the narrow bit above my laundry bag, and dresses, skirts and coats are in the other half of the wardrobe which is a mirror image of the side you can see.

And that's my room! I really love it, I think I've made it my own without spending too much or making any huge/irreversible changes which would lose me my deposit. I'm looking forward to living here for the next year!

So I'm back at university and although lectures don't start till Monday it feels good to get back in the swing of things. There's something about the walk into town on a crisp autumn day and seeing the cathedral tower rising up over the rows of houses that truly lifts my spirits, but it's also comforting to come back to a city I know instead of starting in a new place like I was this time last year. The major difference this year is that I'm living in a student house which so far has been a really lovely experience, it's so nice to have a big space to live in instead of a tiny room in halls - not to mention a pretty decent-sized TV and a lovely bathroom!

On the drive up my dad and I stopped off at Bluewater for a bit of a shopping spree and of course I bought a few things. Unfortunately the big H&M was closed for refurbishment and Forever 21 was 50% off the whole store (which sounds good but it was an absolute tip, full of summer stuff and impossible to find anything), but I still managed to spend quite a bit of time and money in New Look. I also got a couple of things in the H&M here in Durham so I thought it was probably time for another haul post, even though my last one wasn't too long ago.

Striped 3/4 length sleeve top from New Look, £8.99

Checked shirt from New Look, £22.99

Striped top from H&M, £7.99

Okay so I realise these might all look very similar but believe me, they aren't. The one on the left is from New Look and it's just a really nice super soft top with dark red stripes which totally match my hair now it's red again. It's one of those really easy to wear pieces that go with a lot of things so I'm hoping it'll become one of my wardrobe staples. The shirt is also from New Look and I really love it - you can't see too well on the photo but it has a sort of twisted fabric thing going on at the bottom so you can't wear it like a cardigan but it's another effortless top that I think will look so good with plain black leggings or jeans. Finally I got this red and blue striped white top from H&M because lets face it, you can never have too many striped tops! I tried this on with blue jeans in the shop and it looked so good as the blue basically matched, I had to get it.

Green corduroy skirt from New Look, £9.99

White trainers from New Look, £17.99

Black suede skirt from H&M, £14.99

Black bag from Forever 21, £7.50

The skirt on the left is actually a really dark green and I just fell in love with it. It was from the 915 section of New Look which I'm really glad I can still fit into (this was an age 12 lol) as the stuff from there is always slightly cheaper. I'd been looking for white trainers for a while but could never find quite the right ones, so I was happy to come across these in New Look - yes I know they're basic af but I need more practical footwear for the colder seasons, especially now I'm living so far away from where I have lectures. The other skirt is a lovely soft imitation suede material and I think it'll just be really handy and go with everything, plus I'll be able to dress it up or down. Last but not least, the bag was the only thing I managed to pick up in Forever 21 but it's really nice, it has two pockets which are just big enough to fit your iPhone in one and some money and your keys in the other so it's perfect for a night out (not that I do much of that) or just any occasion when you don't want to be carrying a big bag.